London-bound

I leave for London early Thursday, will be there for a week.  Still no better at packing... And the dreaded question is, How do I pack for a week of London rain?

Roast Vegetables, Fitness & Impending Travels Again

This winter I have become addicted to roasted brussels sprouts.  So delicious, so easy, and even good cold the next day.  I especially like to load our version with lots of garlic, which gets caramelized and crunchy once broiled.  Mmm mmm good.

Last night I also roasted some leftover cauliflower and broccoli, tossed in olive oil, garlic, salt, pepper and some cayenne pepper.  The cayenne pepper gave it a nice spicy kick.  The vegetables went nicely with the bone-in porterhouse steak.  (I really want to start taking nicer photos of food... these photos are taken on my Blackberry, so I apologize for the low quality.)

A very handsome boy but also a very silly one... this face expresses his delight in the spicy roasted cauliflower and broccoli.

It feels fantastic to have a fridge stocked with vegetables -- and in the winter, roasting is such a terrific, easy way of eating them. 

As I mentioned briefly before, David and I have also started a new gym routine at the start of this year.  Or rather, David began a new work-out regimen and also acts as my personal trainer.  It's called "Power Training," and the idea is to work your body as a whole, as opposed to separate sections.  I have managed to stick with David doing this program, and am enjoying it.  It definitely focuses me at the gym, and it feels good afterward.  I have even done bench presses, albeit just with the bar and no weights (but hey, who knew that bar was really heavy!).  David is an excellent trainer (although sometimes he is bossy).  And now I am not in excruciating pain the next day!  (David says I need to use even heavier weights... ever so tough.)

It's great to get in the groove of eating healthy (i.e. mostly organic and at home, not too much dining out) and going to the gym regularly.  It looks like we will go to London for a month in April, though, so I hope we find a way to continue our ways and not get too fat/chubby/out of shape.  Always difficult when we're on the road... But we're looking forward to going to London, it's been a while since we traveled for work.  It's just about balance...

Tomoko in NYC, David in London

I flew back to New York last night -- David went onto London from Berlin for a few days to work with the new resident choreographer who has been appointed there. David flies back to New York via Dusseldorf (silly, yes, but so it goes with different DD territories paying for pieces of his travels) Thursday.

It will be GREAT to stay home for a while with no work trips scheduled (crossing fingers) until the end of January, when we "move" to Berlin.

It's already mid-December!! How did that happen. The year has passed so quickly, and for much of it we were not in New York, sadly. New York is gorgeous this time of the year, so it's nice to be home. It's nice to be home, period. It's an odd thing when one finds oneself acclimatizing to one's own apartment, having been outside of it for so long. I keep finding various hotel keys in my coat pockets and handbags... surely a sign that we live in hotels too much.

Anyway, David and I will have to pull our socks up and get re-acclimatized to the world outside of DD and get some serious Christmas shopping done this weekend!!!

In London again, this time living in Bloomsbury

(David in the "egg" chair in the Silverjet lounge at Newark Airport)

David and I arrived in London this morning, safe and sound.

DD London used to have a special corporate deal with EOS, an airline that catered to business travelers with dedicated aircrafts with only business class seats. It was a good airline, although not as good as Virgin Atlantic Upperclass, the best of the best seats in the sky. We were prepared to fly on EOS again this time around, but, sadly, just as DD London went to book our flights, it went bankrupt. This resulted in our trying a new airline catered to business travelers between New York and London, called Silverjet.

It was awful.

The airline has good intentions, with people from check-in to flight attendants who very much wish their patrons to be happy. But as an airline supposedly targeting business travelers (i.e. people who have their companies pay for their expensive flights as a part of their contract/deal), it just doesn't cut it, and frankly, isn't worth it. The seat, while there was good leg room, was little better than Premium Economy on, say, Virgin Atlantic. We never thought we'd say this, but we think flying business class on American Airlines is better than flying Silverjet. And the food was inedible. Luckily, David and I had smuggled a chicken salad we'd bought AT THE AIRPORT. You know a business class meal really doesn't stand up for what it should when eating a chicken salad bought at Newark Airport is better than the stuff provided on the airplane. David and I still had a good time traveling together, drank a lot of wine but didn't even watch any movies, the TV with the seats being very dirty-looking and unappealing... but we hope to never have to fly Silverjet again. Even our driver once in London said that many business travelers he picks up from the airport, having flown Silverjet, are unhappy. Plus the airline doesn't own many aircrafts and only has one flight a day between New York and London, which kind of defeats the purpose of business travel -- when you travel for business, you usually don't have a day to waste. You need to get to your business destination as planned. On Silverjet, if an aircraft breaks down, there is not subsequent flight that day to get you where you need to go -- you need to wait 24 hours to try again, at which point you're late to your business occasion.

At least David and I made the most of it, I suppose.

(In the airport lounge for Silverjet, before we discovered just how crappy the airline was.......)

(Thank goodness for not having enough food-faith in a new airline...! We bought pre-packaged salad at Newark Airport, which was gourmet compared to the pathetic excuse for food served on the flight. At least wine is most always good, if only due to its alcohol content.)

Now we are in our flat in Bloomsbury, which is nice. It's very spacious and bright, and it is in a more residential area of central London than we have stayed before -- which means we can grocery shop easier and better. There is a big Waitrose just around the corner, which carries everything we would need in terms of cooking at home. There are places to eat, and there is also a gym down the street we can join. There are certain aspects of the apartment that are weird, but we have or are dealing with it. Some of which are:

- Plastic flowers. Like, elaborate ones. Totally unnecessary, totally creepy, absolutely ugly, and only existent to collect dust. This is a fancy apartment block. Why does it need any fake, NASTY looking, depressing, plastic "plants"? Who in their right mind enters an apartment and thinks, "Wow, I am SO glad someone bothered to give the flat some life by filling it with cheap, plastic flowers"?! I spent the first 30 minutes in the flat cleverly finding closet spaces in which to hide these offensive plastic junk, so that I may never have to see them again.

(They look better in the light... click on the image to view it larger and more detailed, for the full fake floral effect. These are all plastic plant concoctions full of dust and totally depressing with which to exist. I am about to shove some of them into the cabinet open behind them.)

- Barney's Womb. That's what I am calling the master bedroom. It is entirely decorated in various shades of purple/lavender. There is even a purple headboard. It's not exactly pretty or exemplary of fine taste in interior design. And with the curtains drawn, it's hard not imagine oneself having been swallowed by Barney the Purple Dinosaur.

- Cleanliness. We've stayed in 3 London flats at this point, and there is one thing they have had in common -- they are never thoroughly cleaned for the next resident. In the last flat, on lovely Floral Street, we found a roasted chicken leg still left in the oven. Thankfully, we have not found any old, roasted and decomposing poultry parts in the oven, but I have had to do a clean over and throw away things. Who wants steak sauce that's been there, halfway used by a stranger, having sitting in the cupboard for who knows how long? This is not a cheap flat. Anyone staying here has certain standards, they are not going to be your typical backpackers scavenging on whatever they can get to save money. NO ONE should enter this apartment and think, "Score! -- There is old steak sauce in the cupboard I can use."

(David in the lounge room, peering into the building across the street...)

(Over looking Coram's Fields, the park in front of our building, from the lounge room...)

Besides these above issues, though, the flat is great. It's a proper apartment unit, and it is comfortable. The natural light is wonderful, and having a park to look over is very calming. It's nice to know that we can carry on having a domestic life of going to the gym and cooking our own food, here in London, despite being displaced once again from New York.

(Our trolley at our local Waitrose... eating healthfully well and organic is so much easier in London these days...)

packing, packing, and, yes, more packing

David and I fly to London this Saturday, and will be there for 4 weeks. We kicked off our packing process yesterday: we got out the suitcases, and David did the laundry while I piled clothes on the bed. Then, overwhelmed as to the next step, we went to the gym.

The packing process never gets any easier, it continues to seem. It's difficult to know, for instance, what the weather in London will be for the next 4 weeks. Apparently it has been beautiful and warm recently, but this isn't to say it won't suddenly become dreary and abysmally wet -- it is London, after all. This means selection of clothing is like guesswork. We say, "take layers" or clothing that can be "layered" -- which sounds great, but, let's face it, there's only so much "layering" that can be done when a person tends to have "outfits."

There are certain elements to the process we have learned to do along the way such as:
- Make lists (obvious, but one can get too cocky and not do so when traveling so often... this has lead to grave regret)
- Get hair cuts (because haircuts abroad can lead to trauma)
- If staying in an apartment with a kitchen (i.e. longer than 2 weeks/not staying in a hotel), pack our own knife, Microplane, peeler (this is an essential for David), and Tupperware (very useful to bring snacks to long days at auditions)
- Get out our European electronics kit (if going to UK/EU) -- hairdryer, plugs, electronic toothbrush, etc. I feel like they are our special gadgets for when we live like secret agents abroad... like 007...
- Take a bathing suit -- you never know, a magical long weekend may suddenly appear for a mini-break (this is usually wishful thinking)

The most difficult part of packing is gearing up to pack ourselves together to leave. After having been back in New York for a good chunk of time, it's hard to leave home again. We still haven't seen our New York friends enough, we haven't seen all the shows we'd wanted to see. Having said this, we are also looking forward to going to London for 4 weeks, which means we will get to see friends in London. It's nice that we pass through London frequently enough, we have the privilege and comfort of knowing that we will see our friends there in the not too distant future.

In some ways, I suppose we have gotten better at packing...we have developed our unique method, as it were. What we can't seem to do is pack lightly. I don't expect we ever will, really. I think we are inclined to always try to take as much of our "home" stuff with us as possible, so that we can plunk down at our next destination and make it as homey as possible.

And here we go again...

David and I are leaving for London insanely early in the morning tomorrow. I will only be there for about a week and a half, after which I must return to New York so that I could gear up to relocate to Toronto for 3 months. David will remain in London until early October, when the London recast rehearsals will complete and the "new" cast goes on stage. At that point, he will join me in Toronto.

It's all a little bit daunting.

The positive side of seeming always to be living out of suitcases these days is that we have, in fact, contrary to my own sense of things, gotten better at packing. This progress, of course, is in no small part due to the fact that we are basically in a constant state of packing/unpacking -- this trains the most inept packer and traveler to learn which items are useful and which items, despite all wishful thinking, one never uses while abroad. And some cities are easier to pack for than others. In London, we know that, should we have forgotten something, we could, if necessary, always buy another (albeit at ridiculous London prices); same goes for, say, Toronto. This knowledge eases up the packing process significantly.

And so we are doing last bits of work, organizing aspects of our lives, and packing again to kick of rehearsal processes. It will be a change from casting (sometimes we forget that all the casting is to come up with a cast to rehearse into an actual production!),

On the Less Glamorous Food Options of a Globe-trotting Creative

David and I had a mellow weekend in London, eating better than we had been on our own.

4AM Monday David left for the airport to fly from London to Vienna; that same night, David flew again, this time from Vienna to Zurich. The European casting tour is winding down to its last week, and the traveling pace has picked up. As I type, David is boarding a plane in Zurich to head for Paris, where he will spend the night. Tomorrow night, he will travel from Paris to Rome.

All this traveling may sound glamorous, but it is too often far from it. In Stockholm, David changed hotels at midnight, just having flown in from Hamburg, because the hotel room was literally the size of a closet with no windows -- which even my taxi driver in Amsterdam, who overheard my conversation with David, confirmed is a fire hazard. One's diet of any kind goes awry on these types of tours, too. For the last couple of days, David has been surviving mostly on a box of gourmet chocolates I'd bought for him in Amsterdam. When he rang from Zurich a little while ago, he told me that he had managed to stuff his face with a bratwurst at an Italian restaurant before his flight. "Bratwurst at an Italian restaurant? After you'd been touring through Germany all this time, unhappy with the food?" I asked. "You don't want to know," he said. I suppose this exchange gives an insight into what the restaurant had to offer.

Food during casting is notoriously bad. Most of the time, the creatives work through the day with no lunch breaks -- we are lucky if we get 10 minutes to chew our food. And it seems that a creative has an option of either (1) eating whatever food is offered during a casting session and get fat and/or ill (because the food items tend to be sandwiches or, in Germany and Holland, bread pieces smeared in unknown creamy substance and laden with meats) or (2) of scrounging for edible, more healthful bits and nearly starve. David and I joked today that we could begin a Dirty Dancing casting tour diet: It's not easy to eat healthfully, but it's sure easy to starve if you are not careful and are too picky. (We don't recommend it.)

I fared better than David in Amsterdam: I've learned to order lettuce bits, tomatoes, cucumbers and cheeses at the cantine, and to demand that there be nothing else added onto my order (the chef really would like for me to cover my salad with creamy slop of what seems to be cole slaw and gherkins). And if this rudimentary salad tactic failed, I knew there was a Burger King down the road from where I could get chicken wings. The dinners were mostly good, since the creatives would eat out together and these dinners were jolly with nice food and plenty of wine.

Now in London, casting and without David here, I am running into a bit of a "food depression." Last night, I went to see the show (Dirty Dancing), after which I had great trouble finding a casual, decent meal. It's difficult enough to eat by oneself in London, let alone at 11PM. I didn't feel like going to a show-biz late night restaurant, but I didn't feel up for the miserable food options at the hotel I am staying (which I hate). I wanted a pizza, but didn't know of anywhere for late night pizza near my hotel. I finally found myself at a late-night Subway on Oxford Street around midnight, amongst drunk people, ordering a meatball and cheese sub with lettuce, tomato and cucumber, knowing that I really would just pick at the cheese and maybe the meatballs. I just wanted some melted cheese (like a pizza). When I went back to my hotel room and unfurled the soggy, disgusting sub with sad pieces of cheese, once melted, now hardened to resemble plastic, I knew I'd hit a new low.

Until today, lunch.

At lunch the casting assistant takes everyone's lunch orders. I thought simple, and ordered a Greek salad. Apparently, any kind of salad is difficult to find in the area of London we were in. So at 2PM today, after having eaten only 6 mushrooms for breakfast as the scrambled eggs at my hotel are totally inedible (the Radisson Kenilworth, NEVER stay there if you can help it, the one in Covent Garden is far superior and that in itself is a sad statement), I found myself with a chicken sandwich from MCDONALD'S, picking through for the chicken bits and the shredded lettuce. The casting assistant had told me that there were no salads of any sort to be found, but perhaps I could eat a chicken kebab. I thought, okay, that will have to do. But I guess one person's kebab is another person's chicken sandwich from McDonald's. Any glamorous visions of my being a globe-trotting theater sensation died then. I am a sensation, of course, and surely globe-trotting, but in that moment, picking through a sandwich from McDonald's, having eaten almost nothing all day, ravishing on shredded lettuce and chicken from, shall I say again, MCDONALD'S, I felt that all this casting and traveling is, as I know all too well, extremely hard work and, too often, not at all as glamorous as it sounds to people who are not having to sit through person after person dancing or singing or acting and picking through a sandwich from McDonald's trying to find some sort of food source.

When David and I are together in a city, our food intake is far better, since we make a point of going to restaurants as a way for us to enjoy ourselves and relax. When alone in a city, unless catching up with friends in that city, dining options become bleaker. I stocked up with nuts from M&S to bring with me to auditions tomorrow, while David bought another box of chocolates at the airport for himself. Tonight, if I get the courage, I intend to go to Roka and sit at the sashimi counter myself, but that courage to dine alone at a nice, chic place with lovely food is more difficult to muster than it seems.

This Friday, very early, I will join David in Rome -- and we both look forward to this. We are starved for a breather, during which we might eat lovely food and relax before going back to New York and heading straight back into Toronto casting -- and a long weekend in Rome is the perfect remedy.

Scrambling yet again...

We are off to Amsterdam tomorrow to cast the Holland production -- we will be there for a week. From there, we are off to Toronto for a week and a half... we are, of course, not at all packed yet, as we have been busy busy all week this week. The usual packing scramble has begun... we are going to get some dinner now, as our task at hand is so daunting, we need to let ourselves have a bit of a breather (we were casting until 8:30pm tonight).

On discovering that I have not improved on packing...

No matter how often we travel, I don't seem to improve on my packing abilities. I do feel that I have become a more clever packer (three words: zip loc bags), but the luggage I pack do not appear to get any lighter with experience. This is the point, at midnight with the car coming to pick us up in 5 1/2 hours, that I begin not to know what I have packed, or hardly have the energy to care. At this point, the way I see it, the more things I bring, the more likely that there will be something useful (probability, you see).

David and I have forgone having any shame concerning our indecision and vanity. We too often bring an irrational number of shoes. So much so that we carry an extra luggage shared between us containing, mostly, shoes. We do carry equipment in this shared luggage (cords, cables, small printer, etc.)... but really, even I question why we both need so many pairs of shoes.

And to top it off, as if we weren't carrying enough things with us for a trip that is not, in all honesty, very long, and domestic, I have decided that this trip was the trip on which I shall read "Against the Day" by Thomas Pynchon. It is a book of mere... 1085 pages... and hardcover.

Looking at all this, I begin to think that perhaps I should stick to trashy magazines (disposable along the way). And I certainly have not improved on packing. But truthfully, I don't think I could give up shoes any time soon. It's all about the choices, you see.

TM

On the importance of a haircut before traveling...

David sporting his new shorter Mod hair, courtesy of his trusty hairdresser in New York.

One of the things one deeply misses when spending time away from home is one's hairdresser. In Hamburg, I had my hair butchered by a hairdresser at what seemed in all its appearances a posh salon -- awards on walls and framed magazine clippings featuring its glories. What ensued at this salon was a nightmare: my hairdresser and I could not communicate with each other (I spoke no German and she spoke no English); she kept barking "Pony, pony!!!" at me (which I later learnt referred to my bangs), and before I could process, she had lopped off a huge chunk of my hair to create this "pony," which was a very architectural-looking mass that would be, henceforth, my "bangs"; she continued to cut despite my best efforts to gesture to her that I did not want my hair short, and finally, upon seeing that I did not appear to be happy about all this, she took out a flattening iron and straightened my hair pin straight.

I had never cried after a haircut. This Hamburg experience would inspire my first tears shed for a haircut gone wrong. And it happened a day before opening night. I cried all the way back to the hotel room, inconsolable, David trying to make me laugh yet hardly able to mask his disbelief at the most atrocious haircut I had just received. I locked myself in the bathroom and wept hysterically that my life had been ruined, I would never leave the bathroom, would never be seen outside, would certainly not attend the glamorous premiere the next evening.

Then something snapped -- a sense of deep injustice boiled in me. I unlocked the bathroom door, retrieved my coat, declared to shocked David that I was going back to the salon to demand someone else fix my hair. So I stormed all the way back into the city to the posh salon (with David championing my decision), demanded to see the top stylist there, explained about my hair and about its consequences on my life. I was firm, I am proud to recall, neither hysterical nor angry. And the top stylist fixed it (still not perfect, but now I was able to leave the house and be seen again). It turned out he was invited to the opening night of our show as well, so we said we would see each other at the party. We never did.

This Hamburg experience made us very careful when getting our haircuts abroad, or by people other than the hairdressers we have come to love in New York. I know there wouldn't be a language problem in Las Vegas or LA, but, hey, one never knows.

TM